Of late I have come across instances, where license administrators are facing issues related to permanent and temporary licenses. I thought it will be a good idea to provide all the relevant information through this post. Let me start with a description of license key types.

License key type : These are broadly categorized into two parts

Permanent: A license issued to a customer to run products for an indefinite period of time.

To order your permanent floating, named-user floating, or authorized user license keys for most products, use the IBM Rational License Key Center.

To acquire an authorized user license key for IBM Rational products based on the Eclipse framework, purchase and download an activation kit from Passport Advantage. See Requesting license keys for information about ordering keys from the License Key Center.

Temporary (evaluation or emergency): A time-limited license issued to a customer for running IBM Rational products. You can use it on any computer until the specified expiration date.

Temporary license keys can be floating or authorized user.

Temporary keys are generated only for single or multiple license servers. They are not generated for redundant servers.

Now as we know and understand the basics about licenses, we can move ahead to discuss a few issues related with using the licenses in your environment. To start off, I would like to discuss about using a newly generated temporary/evaluation/trial license.

The figure below shows the contents of a temporary license file

By default,

the Host name is “this_host”

the host id is “ANY”

the host-id is “ANY” to signify that this license can be run on any machine irrespective of the license type,

But while configuring these licenses on the license key server you need to make sure that the host name is updated to reflect the the actual Host name of the machine on which the license key server is running.

If this is not done, license checkouts will not happen.

Steps to modify the temporary license file:

1. Open the temporary license file with notepad or any other text editor.

2. Replace this_host with hostname of the machine.

3. Save the changes and exit from text editor.

If the Rational license key server is running on the host ABCD, then the above steps should be followed and the updated file should look like the one below

There may be instances where you have to use both permanent and temporary license. The following discussion focuses on this.

How to serve both permanent and temporary licenses at the same time

As pointed out earlier for temporary licenses, the following files are used

rational_temp.dat

rational_server_temp.dat

and for permanent licenses, the following files are used

rational_perm.dat

rational_server_perm.dat

So we have to configure the license server to read two license files instead of one